Tell me about your stories and the monsters they feature!
My stories center around Alex Kind, a young adventurer who finds out her father was a kind of God, and part of an order of Gods and Monsters called the Dusk Kind. Once she’s awakened to this, she starts investigating her past and meeting all kinds of strangers. The aim of the books, which are novellas really, is to combine interesting stories and characters with sexy, sometimes tongue in cheek erotica. Another goal is to focus on monsters that come from the lore of other real world cultures. I picked El Chupacabra and Kaala Bandar first because they’re really some of the more recent monsters to show up in world monster lore. They’re something someone might have heard of, or read about on the internet, but don’t know a lot about. In other words, they’re open to interpretation, but not completely foreign to readers. My next stories will contain more obscure monsters, along with a few familiar faces from monster pop culture, hopefully with a new spin.

What do you like to call your category? “Monster erotica”, “beast porn”, something else?
I like Monsterotica, Paranormal Romance and Monsterporn. They all have a kind of wink-and-nod quality to them that says that I understand this isn’t Tolstoy. On the other hand, I’m advertising Live Nudes, but I’m trying to deliver a little fine dining along with it. The characters hopefully have a depth that builds from book to book. The second book is perhaps a little more dramatic than one would expect from their monster porn, but the hope is that by delivering a compelling story between monster love scenes, it’ll bring readers back.

If there was no such category as monster erotica, what would you call your work?
Probably Monster Adventure Sex Horror Drama. Or MASHD. I could go with “GET MASH’D TODAY!” as my subtitle 🙂

Why do you write and read monster erotica? What’s the appeal?
I read it because it’s fun. I write it because it’s even more fun. Some folks out there are doing some really strange and interesting things. I’m not just talking about making out with Bigfoot, which, parenthetically, was the first I’d ever heard of. I mean, if you don’t count Vampire and Werewolf romance like Twilight, there’s still a broad spectrum of monster erotica out there. I read a story a little while back about a gingerbread man who wakes up, makes a gingerbread woman, and they have little sexy frosting adventures. It had a really cute and fantastical ending. It wasn’t the kind of thing that would get me going, but it was fun to read, and an interesting way to look at the world. It really broadened what I thought monster erotica could be.

Favorite sexy beast?
It’s hard to say, but so far the most interesting to me has been Alex’s father from book 2, if not Alex herself. He had some interesting naturalistic powers which made thinking about the kinds of things he could do while making love really fun. By the end of book 3, Alex can do something really fun things too-things like ghosting through doors and pushing the minds of regular people. It’s interesting playing with the morality not of the sex itself, but using powers to enhance or influence it. That’s where some of the drama comes from. When does it become immoral to seduce a normal when they are unable to resist you? Alex will struggle with that more and more as time goes on, as the rest of Dusk kind tries to persuade her to disconnect from her humanity.

What else do you write?
I write fiction mostly, and I’m working on a science fiction book that’s somewhere between Neal Stephenson and George RR Martin in form and style. It’s at around 85,000 words now, and about half done. There are probably too many characters in it, but I love them all.

Kiss/kill/marry: Bigfoot, a Grey alien, the Loch Ness Monster
Kiss Ness, kill Bigfoot, and marry Grey Alien. Nessy lives in a gorgeous loch, likes to swim, and the people around there seem to love him. Bigfoot seems too anti-social. I’d kill him with kindness and probably smother him with too much affection. In the end, he’d leave me and seek solace in the forest. I imagine that much later, we could be the kind of friends who occasionally get drunk and regret it the next morning during silent breakfasts. The Grey Alien is almost certainly the bad boy of my dreams. He’s got the cool space ship, travels, is open minded enough to date ladies from another planet, and probably probes in the best way possible. Can you imagine the view from his orbital bedroom? And those big eyes you just lose yourself in? Sigh. Put a ring on it.

What’s the best writing advice you ever heard?
Read everything and write every day, even if you think what you’re writing is crap. Keep writing. You can go back and edit later. Write through the bad ideas. Write through the writer’s block. It’s the only way you’ll get better. Also, never take the climax away from your protagonist. I don’t mind teasing a little though. 🙂

Anything else you’d like to say?
“If you obey all of the rules, you miss all of the fun” and “I’d rather be judged by twelve than carried by six”. The first quote was Katherine Hepburn, and the second quote is Ice Cube. They’re both saying kind of the same thing to me. Break the rules, or be broken by them. That’s dangerous, but it’s the only way to live.

About the AuthorEve Hugo has probably lived a hundred lives, but the next incarnation will be the one that gets to brag about their last life. She exists with the right number of pets somewhere near Seattle. Fleeing is not an option. Check out her website for links to her books on Amazon: http://evehugo.com/